Reviewed - Babel:We know from Amores Perros and 21 Grams that Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu holds a bleak worldview, and he emphatically affirms this in Babel, which concludes the trilogy of movies in which he and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga employ overlapping narratives to reflect on the human condition.
Babel takes its title from the Biblical reference in Genesis to the tower built towards Heaven, which so angered God that he made each person speak a different language, halting the project and spreading confusion across the planet.
That is an apt metaphor for the modern world, and the film acutely reflects the confusion of our times, the lack of communication and the propensity for conflict among peoples separated by cultural, religious and political differences. Iñárritu and Arriaga broaden their dramatic range by intersecting four narratives set and shot on three continents.
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play an American couple on a holiday in Morocco that is fraught with personal tension. In San Diego an illegal Mexican immigrant (Adriana Barraza) is the devoted nanny who impulsively takes their two children in the car driven by her reckless nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) over the border to her son's wedding in Tijuana.
In Tokyo, the police are seeking out a widower businessman (Koji Yakusho), while his deaf teenage daughter (Rinko Kikuchi) resorts to sexual provocation as her response to the boys who reject her. And in the mountains of Morocco, a young goat-herder boy is showing off his marksmanship with his father's new high-powered hunting rifle when he fires a fatal shot that sets in motion events that link all the protagonists and those around them.
From this intricate premise Iñárritu portrays our world in snapshots of friction driven by selfishness, fear, isolation and an inability or unwillingness to listen or understand, most likely when the speaker is using a different language and is immediately classified as foreign. And the movie is steeped in post-9/11 paranoia and prejudices.
Iñárritu and Arriaga have constructed Babel in the form of a tantalising jigsaw, gradually revealing layers of information as the movie cuts between its disparate narratives. However, cohesively intersecting these strands eventually forces them to devise some contrived coincidences and towards making a connection between one storyline and the other three that is exceedingly tenuous.
Babel makes for absorbing cinema up to a point, and it benefits from the conviction in the performances Iñárittu elicits from his international cast (and Kikuchi, in particular), but it is ultimately rather less profound and meaningful than their ambitious aspirations intended.
